This is a book review for Lost Connections
I read Lost Connections because, while I was at dinner with my husband, we watched all the tables around us absorbed in their phones rather than each other. As someone who works daily with clients, educating them about technology addiction, mindful leadership, and building collaborative teams through mindfulness… it wasn’t shocking that individuals who have a hard time being present in a meeting had a hard time being present at dinner, let alone a date.
Description:
Award-winning journalist Johann Hari suffered from depression since he was a child and started taking antidepressants when he was a teenager. He was told that his problems were caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. As an adult trained in the social sciences, he began to investigate whether this was true—and he learned that almost everything we have been told about depression and anxiety is wrong.
Across the world, Hari found social scientists who were uncovering evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused by a chemical imbalance in our brains. In fact, they are largely caused by key problems, like lack of community and connection with the way we live today. Hari's journey took him from a mind-blowing series of experiments in Baltimore, to an Amish community in Indiana, and then to an uprising in Berlin.
Hair takes us on an epic journey that will change how we think about one of the biggest crises in our culture today.
Before I read this book, I didn’t understand the dramatic impact that connections and community with others play in our overall happiness and horrendous outcomes when we do not have them.
I view community as the invisible social bond that binds us together for a common purpose towards impacting the greater good. In the workplace, Henry Mintzberg says, “Community means caring about our work, our colleagues, and our place in the world, geographic and otherwise, and in turn being inspired by this caring.”
It can be invigorating to have all kinds of people and energy moving towards a common goal and can be equally demoralizing when the power of individuals to create change within these organizations has been vastly misunderstood and diminished.
I highly recommend this for every professional. As leaders and coworkers alike can go “Faster alone, but Further together” and in today’s fast-paced culture… who wouldn’t want to go further?!